A google image search for "bachelor party" yielded the expected results. Wikipedia tells me that "Increasingly, bachelor parties have come to symbolize the last time when the groom is truly 'free' and without the influence of his new wife."

Celebration.co.za says "The bachelor party is a party for the groom to party the night away, with his male buddies, as his last night of being a single man and to possibly do things / activities his future wife may not approve of."

What to expect

"The groom's mates often, after heavy drinking, subject the groom to various humiliations, sometimes in public. These often include leaving him tied naked to a pole or placing him on an aeroplane to a remote location." Source.

Think: heavy drinking, shaving of eyebrows, painting of body parts, general mayhem.

The presuppositions

• It's your last night of freedom - enjoy it (assumption: a wife takes away your freedom).
• Many people refer to the wife as "your ball and chain."
• The idea is that the man gives up his autonomy and now can't do anything without another's approval - the implication is that she won't approve of anything fun from now on.
• Some people think that once married life begins, boredom sets in, because it's impossible to live an adventurous life with a woman in tow.
  

Me, the party animal

I've never been a heavy partier. In fact, for most of my life I've been an "observer" - someone who watches what goes on without (often) getting involved. So it's been healthy for me to move beyond that, and to participate in things which I don't know how to do "properly". Sometimes I've had to pretend that I'm having fun, so that I don't offend my friends.

I've been to a few bachelors parties. They've been interesting. Almost none of them serve any purpose beyond attempting to embarrass the groom. Also, see the presuppositions above: they're all rubbish (obviously!). So why do something which gives credence to them?

The necessity of it all

Some people would say that a bachelors is a necessity, that it's one of the few rituals that we (English-speaking South Africans) have left. This resonates with me: I like rite-of-passage rituals and feel that those who haven't gone through them have missed out.

All rites-of-passage rituals have a purpose: to move a person from one thing to something else. Like from a boy to a man. So what is the purpose of a bachelors, then?

The ever-reliable Wikipedia tells me that "The history of bachelor party is thought to have originated with a bachelor dinner that was traditional in ancient Sparta (5th century BC) where soldiers would toast each other on the eve of a friend’s wedding."

I like that concept: the friends of the groom getting around one of their fellow warriors and wishing him well for the future, for his new life. How we got from something profoundly affirming to something almost entirely de-structive - I don't know. I know this much: I don't like it.

The presuppositions of my marriage

• Danya doesn't take away my freedom - she increases it. By being with her I have more options for life and am amazed by what she's drawing out of me.
• My capacity for adventure increases by being with her. For instance, I've wanted to go back to China ever since I first went there, but want to share that *with* someone.
• We will have a full life with each other, growing into people we never thought possible.
  
• I will be completely loyal to Danya at all times.
• I wrote this to her a while back: "I commit to having a group of people around me external to our relationship who hold us and our relationship in prayer and positive intentions, and who, in a world of failed relationships, help guard and fight for our own relationship."
• I'll always tell her the truth and will always trust her.
• We see the other as our "adventure partner for life."
  

These are some of the presuppositions of my relationship with Danya...and as you can see, they're in direct conflict with the presuppositions of a bachelor party.

And now?

And so I'm thinking of not having a bachelors party before my wedding in December. What do you think? Do you think I'm being too serious and not playful enough?

I'd like to "take on the system." I've been at enough bachelor parties where the groom is uncomfortable, a lot of the people there are uncomfortable, and there's an unspoken thing of "this is stupid - we could do it a lot better." It's meant to be affirming, not something you'll regret.

Technorati Tags: bachelor party, wedding, rites of passage

My apprenticeship with NieuCommunities wraps up in 3 weeks. It's been an absolutely fantastic year, with learning so much and growing immensely. Pretoria has been a surprising place - more interesting and diverse that I expected - with great people. I'm going to miss it!

After we wrap up here, I'm going to White River to spend some time with my fiance, Danya. She's wonderful! We got engaged in September and are planning to get married in December. She's been working in Positive Living (holistic health) at York Timbers in Sabie for nearly the last 4 years and will be studying a master's in Diversity Studies at UCT next year...so I'm moving to Cape Town in early February! After we get married in December we're heading to Canada for just over a month, to spend Christmas with her extended family and to see her friends.





We've just started a Heart Project at NieuCommunities: creating a work of art which gives a tangible expression to the past year. I've already come up with some ideas (acrylic, canvas, beads, triptych, photos, white space, video) and will be working on this over the next few weeks.

I was at my sister Lyndi's wedding in Cape Town last weekend - and it was great! She looked stunning and the day came together so well. Congratulations, Lyndi and Andre! They're on honeymoon in Bali right now...and I look forward to seeing them more in Cape Town next year.



Danya and I have found a place in Obz which looks like a good place to start our life together. It's a pretty vibrant community (and no, we're not on the ground floor!) and close to UCT. I'd love to pursue Interactive Visual Art more next year and hopefully make it a full-time thing. Otherwise I'll still be doing freelance web development (about to finalise www.mudanca.co.za - my latest site for a client) and perhaps coaching too.

So that's me! A lot of changes around, a lot to think about and do, but things have been good. Let me know what you've been up to, too :)

Several of us from Nieu Communities with an appreciation for the prayers and creeds of the Church have created a site to post one each day. We would love for you to join us and others around the globe in saying these prayers and creeds on a daily basis. We will begin posting on Monday, 7 July.

Please stop by the site and subscribe to have each day’s piece sent you via email or rss.

Steve Hayes and I are hosting a Tshwane religious bloggers meetup at Greenfields in Hatfield, Pretoria, on Saturday July 19 at 9:30am. And you're invited! You don't have to be a blogger either - just someone who is happy to hang out with some others and talk about G-d. Come along!

"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
James 1:27

So much has happened this last month - where to start? I've spent a lot of time in Mpumulanga with my girlfriend, Danya, helping her recover from her 6th foot surgery (if at first you don't succeed, sky diving's not for you) and traveling around (turns out SA Roadlink is not a good bus to travel on - a 3 hour journey by car or City Bug to Nelspruit turned into a 7-and-a-half hour journey by SA Roadlink). Danya works in Sabie, which is such a beautiful place. Unfortunately, HIV/Aids infections have not decreased in the last 4 years, and people are still reluctant to get tested.

As part of my apprenticeship, I job-shadowed Danya's friend Lerraine, who works in the social responsibility department of York Timbers. I got to meet David Poole, one of SA's top experts on medicinal herbs, and hear about projects which they're planning. Lerraine told me about York's community gardens, which provide sustainable produce to local communities. She also showed me their adult education computer training centre, one of the mills and a clinic.

I've also spent some time with Alan Hirsch - one of the top thinkers on building movements which bring about change, all within the Christian framework.

Jody and Andrew went to Amahoro: Rwanda - I was at Amahoro in Uganda last year - and had a very growing time.

We did a week at Pangani called The Sacred Romance - an intense journey focussed on the heart, asking the big questions of life. I've come away with several huge questions and insights, some of which might take a lifetime to grapple with.

Of course, the big news of the last month in South Africa is the xenophobic attacks. As a single South African it's hard to think what difference I can make, but being part of a community response reminds me that if everyone does something small, big changes can happen. I've also continued my involvement with Change Agents - we've run our first 2 of 5 training days (Joburg North and Ekhuruleni), equipping local church-based youth workers to do their ministries better. Although this isn't something which directly impact xenophobia, in the medium term it can help, since xenophobia isn't simply about locals not liking foreigners - the issue is bigger than that.

I'm although thinking through what will be good ways to continue responding to the refugee crisis in SA. Once the humanitarian concerns have been met (food, shelter, safety) and this round of anger has cooled down, we have to face the task of re-integrating these foreigners back into society. In the meantime, sitting around all day is a boring existence - so I've had an idea: to play movies in the evenings for these groups. We have a refugee camp just down the road in Akasia (the one which has been in the news because all of the men (mostly Somalians) are on hunger strike to protest their prolonged poor treatment by the South African government) and strong ties to about 75 Zimbabwean refugees in Pretoria. What would be a good way to help them use their time in a good way, beyond reading newspapers and playing checkers?

BlyNet (meaning "Just stay" in Afrikaans) is a site encouraging Afrikaners to stay in South Africa instead of fleeing due to crime or whatever. It's endorsed by prominent Afrikaners like Steve Hofmeyr, Ryk Neethling and Fanie de Villiers.

I was about to look through the Attention Deficit Disorder Association site but then went and did something else.

I've been involved in churches and camps which have been multi-cultural - and it's worked out really well. When dealing with multi-cultural stuff, people need some kind of commonality - and often religion can play that role, and instead of being polemic, can be a point of unity. I've experienced that unity (and have also experienced that polarising, even within Christianity), and I found an article today which points in the same direction - I've taken the best bits out of it and put it below. I like how it ends, talking about how the church can explore new forms of collaboration that enable it to lead in celebrating the gifts that will be a part of our richly multicultural future.

--x--

In the UK, more churches were planted in the last seven years than Starbucks were opened—over 1,000 churches as compared to only 750 Starbucks coffee shops. Interestingly, most of these church plants were ethnic and multi-cultural.

[...]

It is past time for those of us who are white to wake up to the reality that we are living in a new majority world. By 2060, the United States will become the first non-European Western nation—a nation of Latinos, African-Americans and Asians. Those of us from European roots will just be another group. All of our churches need to help prepare to not only live in this future but receive and celebrate the gifts from other cultures as well.

In other words, the days of people with European roots running the world and the church are rapidly slipping away. While the churches in Western countries are overwhelmingly in decline, many churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America are growing at an explosive rate. Many of these churches are involved in reverse missions—planting churches in the United States, Canada and Britain. The leadership of the church will also increasingly shift to the majority world.

Clarkston Bible Church in Clarkston, Georgia, has already awakened to the new reality. Older white southern women in their Sunday finery find themselves worshiping with immigrants from the Philippines, Togo, refugees form war-torn Liberia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Afghanistan. Slowly, more and more churches are becoming much more like our richly multi-cultural world. But not only traditional churches are beginning to wake to this new reality. Young innovators are as well. Increasingly, multi-cultural leaders are beginning to come to the fore.

[...]

There are even a few mono-cultural churches that are beginning to question whether that model is fully biblical. Kingston United Reformed Church in Britain, comprised of Korean, Russian, Nigerian, Chinese and English members, has worked very intentionally to become a multicultural congregation. Pastor Leslie Charlton believes diversity is essential to being church. “You cannot call yourself a church if you are all the same.” She added, “It may be a nice group, but a church, like the kingdom of God, must have room for everybody.”

In Doug Lee’s church plant, called Catalyst in Culver City, California, the multiethnic congregation enjoys the rich gifts of several different cultures. People from the South Pacific Islands bring a spirit of warmth, welcome and generosity. African American members teach others about being fully present to God and highly invested in worship. Latino members remind the congregation of the importance of family and hospitality. And Asian members bring service without the need for recognition. Doug Lee says his church family is richer because of diverse gifts people bring.

[...]

Mustard Seed Associates hosted an evening with community activist Rudy Carrasco called “The Color of Love in the City” to start a conversation about what love looks like between communities. After Rudy shared his stories, Eliacín Rosario-Cruz led a discussion on race and culture. To my surprise, people from a range of different racial backgrounds shared very openly about both their pain and their attempts to live faithfully in a multicultural society.

One of the most innovative congregations in the US in the area of ethnic diversity is a church in Southern California actually called Mosaic. It is located in Los Angeles, California, where people from all over the world settle. The church responds to the challenge of a multi-cultural, postmodern, pluralistic and global community. Like the emerging church, they give a major piece of their life and mission to the arts; their group Urban Poets includes artists, dramatists and social innovators.

Most of the pastors of these churches are not content to just create interesting programs to meet the needs of people within the building. Like missional leaders, these church planters are intent on involving their members in word and deed ministries that impact the lives of people in their communities. Eugene Cho created a multicultural church plant in Seattle called Quest. Quest has been devoted to local and global mission from its inception. Their coffee shop, the Q Café, serves as a place to engage their community and a performance space for local artists. They work with the homeless and offer computer education classes for kids struggling in school as well as being involved in global initiatives.

As you can see from this brief overview, multicultural churches—along with the increasing number of immigrant churches—are going to be part of the growing edge of the Church in Western countries. This new mosaic stream is quite diverse, but what they all seem to share in common, like emerging churches, is their desire to a reach out to new generation. Like the missional churches they also see their mission much more focused on the needs of those beyond their congregation. We all need to pay more attention to what God is doing through the mosaic stream and explore new forms of collaboration that enable the church to lead in celebrating the gifts that will be a part of our richly multicultural future.

I've been attracted to the idea of micro finance ever since I saw it in action in Uganda last year. The model was working really well, and empowered people to pull themselves out of poverty by using a peer-support system. I've recently come across a website - Grameen Foundation - which does a similar thing, and works alongside Micro Finance Institutions to to give them technical assistance. Has anyone seen examples of this model which work well?

2 of our group are heading to Zimbabwe this weekend to be with people and hear their stories. Just after hearing about this, I was emailed this post on the 24-7 prayer site, about a Canadian who talks about why she has moved to Zimbabwe, a nation in turmoil, while so many are leaving it, and her hope to see Jesus "impact and invade that nation for his glory."

I wish the South African government had done more about Zimbabwe; I wish the Church had done more; I wish I'd done more. All I'm doing now is praying for the crisis to be over, for life expectancy to rise and there to be food on the shelves again.

Good luck, guys!

So turns out I have a few other blogs - one of which is FutureChurch, where I blog about the future of the church in South Africa. I tend to write my theological reflections there - and more about what is happening at Pangani and NieuCommunities here. This last week I've got some posts out of my system...

While talking about what church could be during our book discussion yesterday, and where Christians would go for community if they left the institutional church, this post was written: Resisting assimilation into the Borg: the future of the church. I'm not really a Star Trek fan, but I thought the tongue-in-cheek metaphor was a not-so-serious fit!

On Tuesday we were looking at the first four books of the New Testament and it reminded me of the first century scholar - N.T. Wright's - research on the Gospel (or "Good News") which the first Christians proclaimed (and why it got them killed by Rome) - "Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not."

I've also recently concluded my series on Easter by looking at Jesus's resurrection on Easter Sunday - and why the Christian hope is that what G-d did with Jesus on that day he will eventually do with all of creation. Earlier posts in that series on are on Good Friday - the death of G-d by G-d - and Holy Saturday - whether following Jesus is worth it.

The last post in my recent return to blogging is on a podcast from the parent organisation of NieuCommunities: CRM. They had a discussion on the shift happening within the church today - away from attractional church and towards missional church.

Apparently I don't like normal pictures. Don't know why...after all, my parents say I inherited their good looks...

We have a number of ways to focus on different things as a community this year. One way is through the postures: 6 lots of 6 weeks which help us to orient our common life towards something specific. One definition of posture is a mental or spiritual attitude. For us they will look something like this:

Listening: Learning to listen to God, to our hearts, and to the culture around us.

Submerging: Being the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in.

Inviting: Becoming fragrant followers of Jesus who gather people around a compelling story.

Contending: Fighting well for the lives and faith of those God has brought into our lives.

Imagining: Seeing and embracing what God has created for us and preparing to engage the next leg of our mission.

Entrusting: Preparing those we have served to go on with God and encouraging them to pass on what they've received.



A blatant rip-off of Chris's post - thanks Chris!

Perhaps instead of saying anything worthwhile, I'll publish all of those posts sitting in my drafts folder. This is us at a Louise Carver concert in February - what seems like ages ago. Part of the deal this year is submerging into local culture, and what better than Louise?! I'm hugging a tomato sauce bottle in the background. Go figure.

Another fine picture of me at the seat of the South African government. This should probably make you wonder why you read my blog. Especially since I haven't posted much recently: getting a girlfriend will do that to you! And doing a 10-day training course...and staying in Soshanguve for 3 days...doing and learning so much right now, my discipline of blogging has relaxed. A little. That will pick up soon.

2 weeks ago I took a trip to the Joburg Art Gallery to see a highly recommended exhibition about a British woman's coming to terms with moving to South Africa in the late 19th century. It's fascinating, using the metaphor of roses as that which reminds her of her past, that which she cannot (at first) let go of, and the aloe plant as the symbol of submerging into her new context. It is a mixed media exhibition, involving wax sculptures, photographs, video, a tryptich...all arranged in an interesting way.

I think it's highly relevant to South Africans as well as anyone thinking through identity/enculturation issues. Let me know what you think! I found the following summary online somewhere:

Produced in collaboration with the South African design team Strangelove (Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater), Dis-Location / Re-Location is a traveling exhibition scheduled to tour to seven South African Museums as of June 2007 to May 2008.

Debate around identity construction an issue particularly relevant in contemporary South Africa, at a time when this society finds itself in a process of redefining and building a new integrated South Africa from the diverse amalgam of cultures that coexist here. This exploration extends into the questioning of what constitutes South African identities, in relation to South Africa's place within the post-colonial African continent. As a result of the demise of colonialism and apartheid, the terms 'belonging', 'home' and 'displacement' seem to be particularly ambivalent and highly contested.  

In the work on the exhibition, Farber explores these ambivalences through a dialogical relationship between South African colonial histories and lived present experience. Farber uses her image as metonym for herself and Bertha Guttmann - a Jewess brought to South Africa from Sheffield in 1885, in order to enter into an arranged marriage with the Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa, entrepreneur Sammy Marks.  Residues of British and Jewish ancestry are visually and audibly grafted together with current influences from the Pan-African, post-colonial environment of Johannesburg. Ambivalences around belonging, home and displacement within this post-colonial environment are negotiated in relation to the artist's second-generation immigrant status.  

In the work on exhibition, the amalgam of Bertha Marks and Farber is represented as engaged in needlework activities, considered as 'women's work' in the Victorian era and as a signifier of 'femininity' through docility and labour. The craft of needlework is used as a metaphor for the protagonist's attempts to negotiate a sense of being 'African' within a post-colonial environment by attempting to 'graft' a new identity physically and psychologically into herself.

Bertha's bedroom in the Sammy Mark Museum, Pretoria, is the space of such self-induced transformation - a private space wherein the protagonist performs a series of physical and psychologically transformative acts upon her body. The physical room might be considered as a metaphoric 'transitional space', wherein unpredictable outcomes may emerge from the grafting of diverse materials and cultures to give rise to new, hybrid, identity formations.

Hooray! My sister Lyndi proved the family right by becoming the first of us three children to get married. Congratulations Lynd! She has chosen (or was chosen by?) Andre who has set up a website called "Lyndi said yes!"

Here's the outline of the talk I'm giving this Friday, titled "Monkey business" (haha). Thanks to those who have already let me know they're coming (Steve, Cobus, Cori, Luc, Bryan, Laura, Chris, Jody, Amanda, Kellie) - I'm hoping to meet a few others who are on the invite list (Dion?). 6:30am, Friday, Seattle Coffee Shop, Brooklyn Mall, Pretoria.
 
 
In the early days of Christian history a small number of men and women fled the corruption of the church to seek God in silence and simplicity in the desert. This was the start of monastic life - a way of seeking and serving God communally which has endured for over 1500 years.

More recently some have suspected that monastic life solves some of the main problems of Western existence: individualism, materialism and consumerism. As a result enough new communities have been formed that they go under the term "new monasticism."

Dispelling some common misunderstandings, Roger Saner will examine why more and more Protestants are learning from and adapting monastic life.

In spite of what his friends say about him, Roger is not a monk - although he lives in a new monastic community in Pretoria North. He is helping Thorsten design a new TGIF website and is moving into the field of interactive visual art. He blogs at www.futurechurch.co.za and boereworscurtain.blogspot.com

Below is the list of ways our community is committed to being "green" this year.

1. 5 minute showers or less!
2. Save water washing dishes and clohting
3. Turn off lights when you leave a room
4. Compost
5. Vegetable garden
6. Walk or ride bikes
7. Car pool
8. Cook together
9. Eat less meat
10. Plant lime tree
11. Use non-chemical cleaning agents
12. Electricity free day
13. Carbon footprint
14. Set water heater to a timer
15. Place brick in each toilet tank to reduce water use

We've been trying to do things to reduce our impact on the environment. Andrew (crazy guy from Virginia...in the States, but probably also the Free State) was tasked with researching carbon footprints sent us an email with some helpful information:

The term 'carbon offset' is used to describe the various actions we can take to counteract the CO2 pollution we create in daily life. Producing all that CO2 does things like rip  holes in the ozone layer - that special atmospheric blanket which filters UV radiation. And radiation as you know cooks our DNA for breakfast and shits terminal cancer everywhere it goes.

SO. please think about what you can do to offset this environmental damage. In trying to average a seemingly endless supply of online websites, it looks something like this: americans (sorry jode canadians are worse) produce about 12,000 kgs of CO2 a year. A return flight from washington DC to joburg produces about 3000 kgs. per passenger. yowser.

Here's the links:

Carbon offsets Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets

Options to offset: http://www.carbonfootprint.com

Going carbon neutral (co2 credits):

http://www.pe-international.com/index.php?id=6085
http://www.liveneutral.org/co2_reduction_tips

We visited the Tshwane Leadership Foundation in town a few weeks back and were met by Katerine, who took us around to a few places where they work with job creation, homeless rights and local churches. Good people.

This next week I'm focusing on listening more to others, and I'll be doing that through reading the newspaper (there's a local-ish Pretoria one we're about to subscribe to) and checking up on some online sites, which are:

• The Reporter, a citizen-journalism site where anyone can write. Some articles are not well written but all of it is raw, (mostly) honest accounts of life in South Africa. See the 10 most popular stories this week.
• Independent Online
• News 24
• South Africa: The Good News a weekly newsletter outlining the good things happening in SA in the last week
• ANC Today, the ANC's weekly newsletter

We're using the CRM Lent devotional during Lent this year - you can sign up for it via email if you like. Or just give up coffee for Lent...or chocolate. Or reading this blog. Or the internet. They're all healthy things to give up!

Tonight ends our 3 weeks of orientation. Orientation has been an introduction to South Africa in general, the area in and around Pretoria North as well as doing some self-discovery stuff. It's been great, and also exhausting. A few staff members have said they're really tired, which is either a function of a necessary time of the year, or we're (already!) too busy. Anyway, this is something I hope to keep track of this year - to not get over-busy.

Tomorrow we start our normal rhythm for the year. This means group discussions on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday from 8:15 - 12:30. And one on Friday morning too. I hope we'll have enough free, self-directed time soon!

What also interests me about Apartheid is the white English role. Most English people in SA seem unaware that the British concentration camps were responsible for the deaths of 26,000 Afrikaner women and children. This is not a legacy to be lightly skipped over, and one that ties directly into one of the most thorny issues for English South Africans: identity. Who are we? We're not British, although many of us hold British passports (or can get ancestral visas, or flee to the UK when we get the chance). We're not Afrikaans, so therefore we're not responsible for Apartheid (so I've heard from many English people). "Apartheid was something which the Afrikaners were responsible for, not us. We had no say. In all levels of government the only people who were employed were Afrikaans." So we withdrew from the public sphere and happily existed in the neutral space between oppression and oppressed, mirroring the behaviour of everyone else.

And so, while not being the creators of Apartheid, we supported it by our silence. The saying, "All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing" applies to us. And applies specifically to our churches...and our theology. I have not seen any widespread work in South African English churches to rethink how we relate to the public sphere, and to how our theology needs to change in order to explain how we might respond to new Apartheids in a different way. In fact, it has been a continuation of business as usual, of a continuing existence in the neutral ground of prosperity, allowing our theology to continue our existence in the same way.

This is not good enough!

Last weekend we were in Joburg and visited the Apartheid Museum. This was my second visit  to the museum  and quite different from the first. This time I went through it a lot faster and it was helpful to get the larger overview. Earlier on in the week Doug, one of the staff members, took us through a simple diagram which helps to explain behaviour.

He drew an iceberg and labeled the bit sticking out of the water, "behaviour". These are the visible things we can see. At the bottom of the iceberg is "worldview" - the way we see the world. In between are "beliefs" and "behaviours". I've found this is helpful way of understanding the ways in which people behave and why.

It was interesting walking around the Apartheid Museum with this in the back of my mind. Some of what was shown was on the worldview level: the Afrikaner belief of being God's chosen race, their search for freedom through the Great Trek, the inequality inherent in the Euro-centric worldview (from colonisation to theology), Hendrik Verwoerd describing Apartheid as "good neighbourliness".

Then some of this was evident at the behaviour level, as worldviews collided: the fear by whites of black people - which drove Apartheid, the rebellion of young people in Soweto because Afrikaans was forced on them as their new language, the state of emergency declared from 1986 - 89, the inability of the government to make any proactive decisions until F.W. de Klerk released Mandela and unbanned previously banned organisations...

My interest is specifically in the worldview of the white people at the time (and now), and the ways in which it has changed (or not) over the last 20 years or so. I can't speak much for Afrikaans people, but my impression is that - by and large - they seem to be bewildered by the turn of events. Even though their origin stories are about finding freedom from an oppressive government they seem(ed) unable to apply that insight to others when their own government became oppressive. They didn't become open to "the other" and instead of finding ways of living together, chose to believe that if this country were democratically run, they would be killed en masse. This fear may not have had to be the truth, but because they believed it they made it true (see the widespread violence in the 80's, where the only way the opposition could bring the government to the negotiating table was to make the country ungovernable).

Which is why it was so remarkable that even when "the other" had the chance to kill their oppressors, they didn't (see the time around the 1994 elections). This is a realisation which instantly breaks the understanding of black people as the uneducated, the uncivilised, the savages bent on blood. This is a realisation which many (most?) white South Africans have chosen to ignore.

Yes, the "emerging church" is a buzzword, and yes, there are people going around talking about how horrible it is, yet it remains a hopeful place for those people trying to imagine a Christianity which can creatively take us forward. Graeme Codrington has posted an article by David Lock, a small-town Baptist church pastor in South Africa, who writes about why he's excited about so much going on with the emerging church. It is definitely worth a read. The article was originally published in the Baptist Today, South Africa, second quarter 2008.

I'll always be able to say, "I got a t-shirt autographed at Shaun Pollock's last game!" (Thanks Bryan and Kyle!) I'll admit to being a bit emotional when he bowled his last over, and when he hit the winning runs...and ok, when he gave his last speech, and when he jogged up the tunnel to the changerooms for the last time as an SA player. Polly has epitomised what has been best about SA cricket and I've loved watching him. My favourite moment involving him was watching him remove 4 Pakistani batsman in the opening over of an ODI back in the late 90's while my (still alive then) Grandfather was over for lunch. 4 wickets in the opening over of a game! Amazing.

I've watched him and Alan Donald decimate England at the Wanderers (I was there!) to dismiss them before lunch on the morning of the first test of Englands 5 test tour of SA in 1998/9. I've seen him rise to become one of the best bowlers in the world, and the best bowler to left-handers. I've watched as he lost some pace but became an even better bowler due to experience and patience. I've seen him swing the ball viciously. I watched him be embarrassed on national TV when it seemed like he was reading a dodgy soft porn magazine in the dressing room while his teammates were batting, but it turned out to be the Sunday Times magazine - and when he realised the cameras were on him he was highly embarrassed! I've attempted to duplicate his bowling action, as have friends of mine. I heard him speak (with Andrew Hudson and Jonty Rhodes) in 1998 as he spoke about his faith in God - a genuine faith, not just a "this-is-convenient-because-then-people-will-like-me" faith. I watched as he took over the captaincy during the Hansie Cronje controversy. I watched as he took batsmen (and bowlers) apart all over the world, and was still a nice guy while doing it. I watched as he single-handedly destroyed the Australians in Australia in 1996 in a game where Alan Donald was injured so Polly had to carry the brunt of the attack himself in batsmen-friendly conditions. I even remember his bowling figures for that game: 7/87. I watched when he scored his maiden ODI century. Polly has been part of my favourite banner I've ever seen at the cricket - at the Wanderers when Donald was still playing. It read:

Polly wants a cracker
Donald wants a duck
We all know what Australia wants
But who gives a ...!!

The best banner yesterday (which won R2000 for its efforts) read:
Shaun Pollock: giving ginger kids street cred since 1995.

He's been consistent and has deserved to be the first post-isolation South African cricketer to have a farewell tour. I watched yesterday as he took a wicket, conceding 33 runs in 10 overs to be the most economical bowler on the day, fielded a few balls on the boundary to raucous cheering, hit a sublime boundary off a front foot cover drive to just in front of us where we were sitting on the grass to take us within 2 runs of a 5-0 whitewash of the Windies...and then hit the winning runs with a 2 down to third man.

Elizabeth summed it up well yesterday: "It won't be the same to not hear Mandoza playing at the cricket."

Farewell Polly, and thanks for the memories.

I'm not going to go into my feelings about bosberaads, but if you know any of the TomorrowToday.biz guys you can guess. Still, this exercise was quite fun - we had to build a perfect square with a rope - while being blindfolded. Apparently many corporate teams couldn't do it in the time alloted.




Image courtesy of Chris: corner number 3!

We've been on orientation for the last 2 weeks which has meant very little internet (difficult for me!) and quite an involved schedule. Most of that time has been either self-discovery stuff (like the Enneagram, a cross-cultural awareness test, team building, lectures etc) or community discovery stuff (cultural history museum, Apartheid museum, the Voortrekker Monument, the Lost City (!)...and others). We've eaten lunch at some great places (like Maders - complete with Vierkleur, but what awesome meat! That's where I'll be taking any visitors as soon as you lazy [expletive deleted]s get your [insert body part of choice]'s up here to come and visit me!) and met amazing people doing things which I can only describe as "heaven-on-earth" -type stuff.

That's not to say that their working conditions are great or even that it feels like heaven, or that these people look like angels. they are people who are giving far beyond themselves with little thought of their own "success." Like Thobile, who is running an orphanage for around 60 kids. She was a school teacher when the Aids epidemic first hit, and noticed more and more kids coming to school without food since both of their parents had died and there was no-one to take care of them. So she began feeding them...and finding gogo's to take care of the kids...and other people to help them...and soon others were sending her kids to take care of. She housed them in her garage and started raising money for them...until one day her principal asked her to choose between being a teacher and being a surrogate mother, since she was spending so much time on the latter. So without any promise of a job or income, she left teaching to start the orphanage. They often didn't have food and the conditions were lousy, but over time (years) others volunteered (without pay) and a few major donations were made (like a house in Soshanguve where everyone stays, and some computers to help with education (note - more computers needed!)). Right now they're helping to raise children who have been orphaned or abandoned, helping to feed them, take care of them and educate them.



Thobile is only one story. We've heard many stories, stories which question the self-centered progress ethic of life. My friend Sarah is a strong advocate of ethics, but only ethics as "that which is necessary in a situation" and nothing beyond that. In her understanding, if you want to do something beyond what is required, then you can, but that's not necessary. She's right - it's not necessary. But when someone like Thobile extends herself beyond the expected into the unknown, there's something beautiful...and welcoming about that. Heaven on earth.

I'll be attending as much of TGIF as I can this year, since being in a different city means I don't know lots of people, I want to plug into networks and interesting conversations at any opportunity. TGIF was originally started as an apologetics group for young professional Christians but after running for 6 (?) years it's a bit more open that that. The meetings are on Friday mornings at 6:30am - in Hyde Park, Cresta, and Woodmead (sometimes), and in Brooklyn in Pretoria. Thorsten has asked me to talk at Brooklyn on Feb 29th (which is a great date - as he said, don't think anyone has ever spoken at TGIF on that date)...and I think I'm going to talk on new monasticism.

Hey there fellow apprentice people

I highly recommend that you subscribe to a weekly newsletter called "South Africa: The Good News" which is a positive (yet realistic) take on what's been happening in SA in the past week. The newsletter sign-up page is at http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/newsletter/index.html

Today is the start of our three week orientation. It will involve introducing the apprentice (5 Americans, 1 Canadian...and moi) to South Africa, to living in a cross-cultural context, to Pretoria, to community life...and to good food. To that end I've cooked supper for everyone twice: pasta and carbonara sauce on Friday night; roast chicken, roast potatoes and veggies last night (finally got that gravy right!). Coming up: Chinese, Greek...and whatever surprising food anyone else wants to make.

In the next three weeks we'll be visiting Sun City, Soshanguve, the cultural history museum, doing an enneagram test, playing cricket, watching Shaun Pollock's last game at the Wanderers on February 3rd, staying at my parent's house and I'll be taking them around Joburg (any suggestions for what to see?!).

In the meantime I'm attempting to learn how to develop Facebook applications in Drupal, and understanding deconstruction. No pressure!

In just under two weeks I pack my Johannesburg bags and - along with my passport - head far, far north, way beyond the Boerewors Curtain to join a new monastic community...in Pretoria North. "Why?" you ask? "Are you becoming a monk?" you say? "What will you be doing?" Read on!

NieuCommunities has been present in South Africa for around four years. The front page of their site explains their ethos best:

Tolstoy wrote, Everybody wants to change the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Maybe we're a little over ambitious, but we want it all. We want to change our world and become a changed people. NieuCommunities is a handful of missional communities scattered around the world who are committed to developing followers of God in the way of Jesus. Each year we invite about a hundred young leaders to come and spend some time with us as we engage our God and our world. Many come on short, 1-2 week Road Trips to get a taste of missional life. But our core formational experience is our 10-month missions apprenticeship. If you're ready to change the trajectory of your life and change your world in the process, we invite you to read on.

Our hope and calling is to shape uncommon followers of God as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together. Jesus lingered long with God, and so we carve out time to do the same. We call this communion. He did life day-in and day-out with a small band of sojourners, so we choose to share our lives with each other. We call this community. He lived with an unwavering purpose as he created spiritual home for others, so we open our hearts to be taught how to live on purpose wherever we find ourselves in the world. We call this mission. Communion, Community, and Mission are the three streams that run through everything we do in NieuCommunities. Each of our communities sets out every year to pursue God relentlessly, to allow our faith and character to be transformed in the crucible of community, and to submerge into the cultures around us and make a difference in peoples' lives.

I met Arthur, Bryan and Sean two years back at the News Cafe Midrand for coffee...after chatting with Arthur online at Emerging Africa and deciding to meet. I didn't recognise them at first since I thought I was looking for a 40-year-old Afrikaans guy...not three laid-back coffee-drinking Californians who looked too normal to talk about church! Turns out they don't just write online about theology and mission and formation and justice - they also live the life. Soon after that meeting I visited their site in Pretoria North - about an hour's drive from my home in Joburg - and started hanging out with them more and more. The first time I visited the Apartheid Museum was with them, which also resulted in another first for me: lunch in Soweto. They're part of the emerging church conversation in South Africa and part of Church Resource Ministries. One of the other CRM ministries - InnerCHANGE - is starting a house in Soshanguve mid-year: my friend Luc Kabongo is leaving NieuCommunities soon to establish that (InnerCHANGE are communities of missionaries living in poor, marginalised neighbourhoods around the world).

I will be an apprentice at NieuCommunities from mid-January to mid-November. After that, who knows...maybe Cape Town? As for my reasons for this decision, due to a number of circumstances it makes sense now, at this time of my life. Last year I realised that I don't want to be doing web development as the main thing I spend most of my time on (I will still working as a freelance web developer for years to come - even this year - just scaling back my involvement). Although I enjoy a great deal of it I'd like to spend more time learning - and practicing - interactive visual art (much like the Nintendo Wii: systems where people can interact with computers in different ways, like movement or sound, and have those inputs translated into music, or games, or varying the height of a helium balloon on a pulley wire with an LCD light inside). Part of my self-directed study this year will be Max/MSP/Jitter, a program which allows for this sort of interaction. My first project will be building an interactive tic-tac-toe game which uses hand movements for plotting where to move on the virtual board.

I've also wanted to live in intentional community for some time now. I'm drawn to monasteries and places of prayer; I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in Grahamstown last November. The main question would-be monks explore during their novitiate is, "What do you desire?" This is also the question asked when they make their vows, and it is exploring this question that underlies this year for me.

NieuCommunities is part of a larger movement called "new monasticism." It isn't based on any usual rules of monastic life - like the rule of St Benedict - mainly because it's developed within the Protestant stream of Christianity (monasteries are usually either Catholic or Greek Orthodox). What has happened in the last 15-or-so years is that Protestants have realised that the monastic way of life solves many problems inherent to contemporary culture, like individualism, materialism and consumerism, and has looked at the monastic way of life to see what can be taken out and adapted to modern life. Those who are new monastics do not become monks, so Sean - you can stop telling people you know someone who's becoming a monk!

NieuCommunities are currently the only new monastic community in South Africa, which will hopefully change soon, since I think it's a good model for how to do faith in community. My friend Brett Anderson is looking to start one in Stellenbosch early this year: he's currently attempting to visit Shane Clairborne (author of The Irresistible Revolution) in Philadelphia.

Wish me luck! I hope to still be around Joburg reasonably often and to start meeting some more people in Pretoria too. I'll also be writing a bit more, on this blog and maybe for some magazines...

 
(This post originally appeared at FutureChurch - this is a re-post)

Hi. My name is Roger. I live in Johannesburg. That it, until yesterday, when I drove into the far north, beyond the boerewors curtain, to live in Pretoria North in a new monastic community ("new" because they allow women. Gotta love progress!).

I usually have an interesting reaction when I tell people I'm moving. In September last year I did some thinking around my job (freelance web development) and realised that although there's much I enjoy about it - and will probably always be doing some web development, it's not the thing I want to spend most of my time on. And so a period of asking the question, "Well, now what?" ensued. I had a few options: changing jobs and working in a creative TV/multimedia environment as a creative director, moving to Cape Town...or Pretoria North.

When I tell people about the options I was looking at, they understand the creative director; they understand Cape Town. When I mention Pretoria North they say, "What?! You're moving where?!" It's kinda fun!

I've written a little about this at my other blog where I write about the future of Church in South Africa, where I will continue writing this year - usually on more thought-out subjects (like "Chaos theory, fractals and the emerging church conversation").

So here I stand - beyond the curtain, which already has its advantages: plenty of biltong and boerewors...and awesome vetkoek! Life is good :)